As the ‘friend’ Ms Clarke mentioned in the article, the reasons for my purchase of this property were roundly misrepresented.

I am, as it happens, currently experiencing seriously difficulties relating to the current Dublin property bubble that, by all accounts, is not happening. This, however, is entirely unrelated to my moon land purchases.

I did not, as purported by Ms Clarke, buy moon land in order to set up a home there, despite the possible commuting issues. I’m not irrational, I know the Luas won’t reach the Moon until at least 2050, by which time I will be well retired and spending my summers on Mars and winters on Venus in a timeshare, when I’m not visiting the penguins on Pluto.

No, the moon land I purchased is simply a matter of legacy. You see I want to be remembered. And I’m very lazy, so I want to be remembered with as little effort on my part as possible.

I was left with a conundrum of how to be remembered. The traditional way to do this, I believe, is to have children. But that comes with a lot of downsides. They expect you to care for them and love them, and even occasionally feed them. So far I’ve got around this by having niblings (children of your siblings) instead of children. Niblings don’t require the day to day nurturing that your own children require, but you can still destroy their Lego creations with your space dinosaur attack and disrupt their education by trying to convince them that space dinosaurs are actually a thing.

Importantly you can also leave things to your niblings that might be passed on to their descendants.

Now let us return to the moon. The legality of the claim on the moon, and subsequent selling of the plots is certainly questionable. But the legal world around us is of our own construction and it may be that moon deed holders come to power and uphold the veracity of our claim, by the time we can actually go to the moon on the Luas. In that case future generations will attribute their wealth and status to my visionary whim (after, of course, a lot of wrangling over who actually owns the deed).

Indeed not only will I have supplied them with the right to moon land, but also with the skills to defeat the space dinosaurs that dwell there (the first of which is not to build your moon dwellings out of Lego) and will fulfil our birth-right to enslave space dinosaurs everywhere (it’s in the constitution – look it up!).

If, however, and this case is much more likely, the claim is considered to be highly questionable, well then we’ve got a long legal battle on our hands. In which the deed, bearing my name, will be discussed at length. I would expect my name to be long remembered, and possibly cursed. But the important thing is to be remembered. Not bad for something that cost 20 euro.

Like my granny always said, if you can’t be remembered for doing some great thing to improve the lot of humanity, you might as well be remembered for causing a complicated legal situation, and the subsequent protracted battle in court.

Those old sayings really are timeless.

So in response to your titular question, I would say that the purchase of moon land is neither a sound financial investment nor an immoral speculation, but rather a way to pre-emptively get back at future generations for their loud music, erratic fashions and insistence that space dinosaurs are not real.

The crisis is back. Dublin is facing a significant housing shortage; with buyers’ beginning to queue for five days before houses open for sale to the public. Property prices in urban areas are beginning to rise, rents are inflating accordingly, while rural areas struggle to gather enough property tax to maintain basic services. Once again as the bubble swells, it’s all beginning to feel a little bit Deja-vu, as we are assured that it is absolutely not a bubble and that there will indeed be a soft landing. People are once again desperate to get on the property ladder as soon as possible, fearing that if they wait prices will once again soar astronomically.

A nasty new trait of this second bubble however is the position of the lowest rung on the property ladder. With dramatically fewer units being built each year, many first-time buyers are being forced to buy second-hand homes. Most of these current home owners are still being scorched by negative equity, so the bottom rung is not the price of the fire-sales of the crash, but rather a price at which previous owners can afford to walk away at (unless of course you are fortunate enough to find a new estate with fixed prices opening in your area). Planners are predicting that the shortage of affordable homes in the city will push the commuter belt out as far as Louth, Meath, Kildare and Wicklow, forcing long commutes on already weary workers. It is no wonder that people are beginning to look around for alternative accommodation.

The question remains however, how far will they go this time? While the desperate among us quote house prices in Leitrim for €45,000 and less, in the Celtic Tiger Era it was not unknown for commuters to undertake a two or three hour daily trek from Gorey, Athlone, Edenderry or Portlaoise. The agreement being that it was possible to buy land and build for a fraction of the city prices and that there was no traffic on the commute once outside the city limits. Usually there was a vague Council Development Plan to improve public transport to these new urban hubs, so really these commuters were early pioneers whose properties were bound to dramatically increase in value at any time now.

A friend of mine took this reasoning one step further, and looking at the advancements being made by Virgin Galactic to commercialise space travel, she figured out that her quality of life and her work/life balance could not be diminished any further if her home was on the moon. Although not currently a feasible commute, she has made a speculative investment on behalf of the next generation and purchased a bijou plot overlooking the Sea of Tranquillity, located on the bright side of the moon, but within easy walking (bouncing?) distance of the entertainment quarter bound to be located on the dark side.

With precedents set in the land grab of America by the Mayflower settlers, and in the plantations of Ireland, the validity of this investment cannot so easily be dismissed by naysayers. The purchase from the Lunar Embassy takes advantage of the UN Outer Space Treaty of 1967 which stipulates that no government can own extra-terrestrial property, but, neglects to mention individuals and corporations. Therefore, under laws dating back to early US settlers, it is possible to stake a claim for land that has been surveyed, by registering it with the US Office of Claim Registries, and by informing the General Assembly of the United Nations, the US Government, and the Russian Government, in writing, of the legal claim. These governing bodies have several years in which to contest the claim, which they never have.

However before my friend bedecks herself in the latest in Pioneer Women’s Fashion, a few practical matters must be addressed. While investing in foreign properties was a characteristic of the first bubble, and I am sure there have been guarantees made that the Luas link will eventually get that far, one must not overlook the unique challenges having a home not only in a different timezone, but also on a different calendar. Acquiring insurance in such a volatile market will have its own quirks and ‘acts of god’ will probably require redefining. Should one decide to lease their property, or enter into time-share, contracts will have to overcome the differences in an Earth year verses a Moon year (354 days). This difference in calendar will also have to be overcome by employers in the new lands as the Working Time Act, Public Holidays and indeed the number of hours in a working day will all need reinterpretation for the new environment (a day on the Moon lasts 29.5 Earth days).

However before rushing forth to these new lands, one must stop to think of the repercussions this absentee landlordism might create. I presume the strategy to populate these new lands will be much as it always has been in human history. Just as the conquests of old, an invading wave of mercenaries shall sweep before the settlers clearing up any misunderstanding the native population might have regarding land ownership, with the colonists to follow, flag in hand, ready for planting. However this general assumption seems to be that much like the Spanish had steel and the English had long swords, that we Earthmen will have the superior weaponry to clear the moon men/ women/ super furry animals/ beings from our path. Not once has anyone stopped to consider that much like playful lambs prancing into a pack of wolves and back out again, that the moon beings have been salivating since the first moon walk waiting for us to come back. Just because they didn’t eat Neil Armstrong on sight doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a shocked and confused alien expression away from his most famous words being “One small step from man, one giant – oh my god, what the hell is tha- it’s got my leg!! It’s got my leg?!”, with Buzz running for his life in the background. Although one could also consider that much like the UN protects developing primitive tribes from the onslaught of modernisation, so too could the advanced Moon civilisation be allowing this culture to grow at its own pace organically, and they are just waiting for us to get there to start selling us the Moon equivalent of sneakers, McDonalds, Coke-Cola and gin.